Arrangement
“Arrangement is the art of organizing sounds and musical ideas over time. In electronic music, a good arrangement often uses just a few key elements and follows simple patterns, using techniques like filters, reduction, and attention to detail to keep it interesting. It’s about finding a balance between subtle changes and moments of contrast to guide the listener through the track.”
Rule of 8
a real classic rule, which says that something should change every 8 bars. (you can watch a short video here)
build towards the DROP
For this approach of arranging a track you must have the “core” of a track fixed. You have the main part/riff/drop finished, ask yourself would you show your friends / family this piece of music? Would you enjoy listening to that 8 bars for a long time? If so, you work backwards to build an Intro which leads to that.
If you are not happy with the “main” part yet, go back and work on that, by doing one these things:
- Find another beat
- Find another bassline
- change the tempo
- change the pitch
- adding music loops
- removing music loops
- replacing music loops
- editing and remake clips (
Cmd-JConsolidate)
If you are happy, continue:
Reduction
This technique is often used is to take the same elements and reduce them, this will give you space to build them up.
There are some keyboard shortcuts in ableton which are super useful for this:
Cmd-Shift-D- Duplicate TimeCmd-Shift-C- Paste TimeCmd-Shift-X- Cut TimeCmd-Shift-Backspace- Cut Time
With this you don’t have to grab, copy, paste to move everything to the right and hope, you did not forget something.